Yesterday we looked at Fluxflux-sl for a Slax based solution on your netbook that is using both modules and Slackware packages.
Today however it is the turn of ArchOne, as the name says a customization of Arch Linux specifically aimed at use on netbooks, in live mode from USB or installed. It is intended for people who "want to try or install Arch Linux" on netbooks "without wasting time with post configuration" and comes with an optimized netbook kernel.

Chances are several of you, or somebody close to you, got a new netbook over the festive period, and now you are faced with the agonising question what to put on it to make it usable. Chances are the version of Windows that it came with does not really do it for you.

I've dug out two lesser known distributions that are for once not based on Ubuntu or using its repositories, and have nothing to do with Nokia, Intel or Google either. Independent is

Yes, for almost three months already the shops have been filled with Christmassy stuff and now it is here. Finally, no more teasing, the real deal. And the people who find it all too much have hopefully managed to escape to the Highlands or some other remote area or somewhere in the world where they don't celebrate it, at least not so much, ideally somewhere south.

It's been another interesting year, in life and in the world of linux and open source. Whatever your thoughts, development is bound to continue at break neck speed.

In the last few days we've had several posts about personal top 5 favorite distributions of 2010. Everybody has their own favorites, but, for what it's worth, here's my list.

My article about the Slax community remix is out as this week's feature story on Distrowatch. I've been wanting to write about Slax and where it's headed for quite some time, and the recent release of Slax Remix v09 as it is known seemed a good opportunity.

So Slax is far from dead, even though its original creator is not working on it at the

Another newly found favorite, ArchBang, is going to release a new version in January 2011. Here's a screenshot. Not that I needed a new release because it is just Arch Linux under the hood and that's been updating perfectly here for the last two months without any stability problems or other issues. I am now running the latest 2.6.36 kernel etc. with wireless still working.

A new release will be good though for if you're just running from disc or USB to get a fresh image.

Just as promised in the last announcement the Scientific Linux team have released Alpha 2 exactly a week later. At this rate we'll soon have a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 clone, which is just as well because the CentOS project seem to be needing more time.
The download links from my previous post are still valid, the previous ISO's have been replaced.
You can also find short release notes here, this time separate for every architecture but nevertheless identical for i386 or for x86_64, particularly interesting for what's been added and changed.
I'm not going to try and turn into Distrowatch and announce every release, but it's quite exciting to see something moving on this front and have a free clone hopefully rather sooner than later. Also, the SL guys are always making some small additions to RHEL that I appreciate.

Whatever the one I downloaded and installed dated 15th October 2010 was, apparently Alpha 1 was just released to the SL servers a few days ago on 03 December. Here's a link to a short README for release notes. It also says that an improved SL 6 Alpha 2 is to be expected exactly a week later on Friday 10 December.

There are now two DVD's and a boot ISO which can be downloaded at

http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/i386/iso/
http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/x86_64/iso/

for those who would like to help out with testing or are just curious. I should say that the usual caveats about running test releases apply, i.e. do not run in pruduction environment or on anything mission critical which is self-evident.